A Brief Comparison of Indonesian Prospective Nuclear Fuel Cycles

Abstract

A brief comparison study on fuel cycles of four prospective Indonesian power reactors has been completed. The study oversees 160 MWt NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR), 10 MWt Reactor Daya Eksperimental (RDE-10), 40 MWt Pembangkit Listrik dan Uap Panas Industri (PeLUIt-40) and Thorcon’s TMSR-500. Both RDE-10 and PeLUIt-40 were fueled with 17wt% HALEU while the other two were fueled by 4.95wt% LEU, without thorium. The study was based on a set of data generated through Monte Carlo reactor physics simulation using OpenMC. The study found that NuScale SMR is the least ²³⁵U consumer by 0.84 g.MW⁻¹ d⁻¹ while the RDE-10 is the most ²³⁵U consumer by 0.97 g.MW⁻¹ d⁻¹. The simulation results show that TMSR-500 is the most uranium consumer by 1.41 g.MW⁻¹ d⁻¹ while the uprating of RDE-10 to PeLUIt-40 makes PeLUIt-40 as the least uranium consumer by 1.14 g.MW⁻¹ d⁻¹. As the least uranium consumer, both RDE-10 and PeLUIt-40 provide the highest attainable discharged fuel burnup of extractable energy of about 146 GWd/MTU. Assuming a one batch depletion scheme, NuScale SMR, RDE-10, PeLUIt-40 TMSR-500 has fuel consumption cycles in 2,210 days, 2140 days, 550 days, and 320 days, respectively.